


Another Hero, Another Mindless Crime

by leonardo_the_vinci



Category: Wicked - All Media Types
Genre: Blood and Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Injury, Original Character Death(s), call me gregory maguire because i too just repeatedly traumatized elphaba for no reason, gelphie is mostly mentioned, i'm so sorry elphaba oh my god, is she. ya know. (gestures with broom) gay and emotionally repressed?, it's not a war unless the wizard says so, like a lot of it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-10
Updated: 2021-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-17 11:01:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29965380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leonardo_the_vinci/pseuds/leonardo_the_vinci
Summary: Elphaba's innate desire to help people had once again left her in probably more danger than she could reasonably handle. A bleak recount of resistance fighters' struggles against Ozian forces.
Relationships: Elphaba Thropp/Galinda Upland
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	Another Hero, Another Mindless Crime

The captain turned his cutlass upon a young Bobcat who was occupied with dragging its fallen compatriot into the woods for cover. He narrowed his eyes, glancing down the blade and lining up a precision strike at its furry neck, and lunged forward. He could have reached it in three steps — two, if he was especially lucky — but a godless, feral scream suddenly rent the air; he whipped his head around reflexively, distracted. The sword whiffed past its target, shaving off a bit of fabric from the Bobcat’s already ragged shirt. It yelped, scrambling faster and faster through the dirt.

The man continued his pursuit, aiming once more for the defenseless pair of Animals, and he had all but put his next strike into motion before he was completely blindsided. Six feet and two malnourished inches of sinewy verdant wrath barreled into him and wrested the sword from his grip. It thudded to the ground. He swung his arms blindly, catching nothing but empty space as his attacker seemed to blink right around his blows. Finally, trying to reserve his strength, he dropped into a looser stance that had served him well in many a typical fight. What he did not expect was to be seized at the temples by the Wicked Witch of the West herself.

Green fingers dug into his head so viciously that they held fast despite their heavy coating of slick blood. She stared directly through him, and the captain began to understand the rumors. He could not look away. On the surface, her eyes were a rather unremarkable shade of brown, but they were at once both unnaturally bright and jarringly soulless. Fulgid golden flecks flared to life in the high afternoon sun. He could tell that she hadn’t slept in a good while. Her undereyes were a sickly shade of grey, ringed with bags. Her face twitched uncontrollably, wire-rimmed glasses filthy and askew. She reeked of adrenaline and copper. The captain regretted ever stepping foot outside his house that morning as he took in the rest of her. 

She growled, displaying a glistening set of blood-soaked fangs, and even more blood trickled in a small wending stream from her nose. A fresh bruise overlapped several older, mottled ones, and lashes of inky hair were adhered to her hollow cheeks by means of savagery-born fluids. But her face was neither wrinkled nor heavily scarred, and he found himself recognizing flashes of _someone_ through all the gore and exhaustion: someone young enough to be his daughter. That gave him pause for a bit too long, and he reprimanded himself silently as he refocused. She wasn’t his daughter; she was Oz’s public enemy number one, and his orders were to dispatch her through whatever means necessary. Torquing his body, he attempted to swing at her once more with his non-dominant hand.

The concussive blast she unleashed directly into both sides of his head sent him ragdolling backwards across the battlefield. His skull collapsed in on itself instantly and his brain liquefied, causing a mixture of tissue and bone fragments to arc gracefully through the air as the corpse rocketed into his squadron. An officer’s bayonet impaled him cleanly through the chest, and he crumpled to the ground like a collapsed lung. Terrified, the previously disengaged soldiers readied their weapons, unsure of how to proceed in the face of quite literally instant death. _Guns, you idiots!_ another officer roared from the back line. _Get moving!_

They charged forward without reservation, decrying wickedness and Animals and green girls all at once, and scattered to surround the Witch in a ring of firearms. The Bobcat and its injured charge cowered in the grass under the crushing gaze of harsh, metallic doom. The Witch was standing over them, palms smoking and eyes unfocused. An entire battle had been about to unfold in the background, but Animals and sympathetic Ozians alike had begun to rush from their held positions toward their endangered commander. Paws and boots and hooves and bare feet stumbled over carcasses and slipped on grass still wet with morning dew.

Elphaba barely moved, only shifting when she realized the cold had numbed her toes. The ground squished under her, and she glanced down briefly to see blood dripping from the sole of her boot as she lifted it. It reminded her of childhood, stomping in puddles and soaking in mud. The sheer wrongness of the thought made her laugh: a tattered, staccato barking noise. A hundred trigger-fingers twitched, and a million little hairs shot up along the back of her neck.

She had been acting on impulse and instinct the entire fight, throwing out whatever magic came to her fingertips without a second thought. She was desperately trying to rationalize death by absolving herself of intent to kill, and she knew it. No matter how she spun it, each corpse — and there were so, so many, strewn in every direction she looked and every recent memory she smothered — still rasped away at her conscience equally. Twisted visages thudded onto the plates of her mental scale, already so skewed in the direction of despair, straining the gossamer-thin chains and edging them closer to shattering in infinitesimal amounts.

The injured Animal — a Caiman whom Elphaba had recruited from a nearby swamp — hissed in pain at her feet. _You’ll die, too, won’t you?_ she mused, already experiencing that impersonal, floaty feeling to which she had become far too accustomed. _Unless we can get you out of here, somehow._ She turned her gaze back to the surrounding danger.

“Don’t move, _witch,_ ” a random soldier croaked, voice cracking the silence. Elphaba’s eyes snapped to his position. He was no older than fifteen or sixteen, with the slightest bit of baby fat still padding the backs of his hands and a shadow on his cheeks that could have been either the genesis of a beard or simply a smattering of acne. He had a white-knuckled grip on a rifle, stock shoved against the bunched fabric of his oversized uniform.

“Or what,” she rasped. Her throat was chronically raw from the past few months’ constant yelling. “You’ll shoot me?” He trembled so hard that she could hear his belt buckle clinking against itself. “Do it,” she challenged. “Use your own hands. End my life.”

The boy wavered, hesitated, long enough that the weight of her words fizzled out and a low grumble began to arise from his more hardened squadmates. _Come on, kid,_ a stout, middle-aged man demanded. Elphaba felt the tips of several knives she had taken to carrying on her person bite into her thighs as she slowly, imperceptibly, shifted into a suitable defensive stance. The soldiers were preoccupied enough with the boy’s indecisiveness as to be oblivious to her movement.

 _Stay low,_ she mouthed to the Bobcat, who flattened his body even further. The Caiman had quieted, and Elphaba’s concern spiked, but the serrated wound on their abdomen was beginning to clot. She remembered — after an embarrassingly long moment — the extreme cold; since they were a reptile, brumation was naturally setting in. _Keep them warm,_ she added.

Meanwhile, the boy had lowered his gun, much to the disgust of the other men. He was paler than a cloud, having lost his nerve a thousand times over. They unceremoniously elbowed him towards the back of the group.

“He’s smart,” Elphaba sneered, thrumming with adrenaline. Her voice jumped forth in uneven intervals. “Smarter than the rest of you, at any rate.” Her allies had begun to hover at a safe distance, taking up residence in the surrounding trees or in hastily dug ditches. They knew not to interfere.

The soldiers were growing tired of the impasse, several men cocking their weapons in gleeful anticipation. Elphaba could easily parse who was most eager to kill her, and she fervently willed her fear to not show. One tremor of the hand, one whiff of despair, and they’d be off to the races, bullets carving savage furrows through her vitals. Hair-trigger: like rabid animals, or mousetraps, or fathers. _Fathers_ — her eyes widened and her breath stuttered.

She noticed the finger twitch out of the very corner of her vision, a small movement of flesh against a wine-dark jacket backdrop, and then the sound ricocheted off itself again and again as the men grasped their mob mentality by the horns and rode it, bucking and lowing, to exhaustion. _This is it,_ she realized, but her body had already begun to move instinctively, arms flying up as she allowed her legs to give out.

Elphaba hit the ground, fully expecting to be _much_ deader than she currently was. Gunshots crackled overhead, but she came to realize that nothing was remotely close to entering her vicinity. The Bobcat and Caiman lay unharmed in the grass three feet to her right, gasping in terror. They looked around frantically, prompting Elphaba to do the same, and she was hit with a bevy of emotions. Shock, relief, recognition; and, strangest of all, a nostalgia so overwhelming that she almost forgot she was on a battlefield.

An enormous, stalwart bubble arced protectively over them, glistening a humiliating shade of pale pink. It caught the fading rainbow of sunrise on its crystalline edge, projecting fragility and belying its extreme toughness. _Coincidence,_ Elphaba tried to dismiss, revolted at her own traitorous heart. This meant nothing; absolutely nothing. She’d probably picked up the technique unconsciously from seeing Glinda cavort about Oz, lavishing her rose-tinted words on hapless, brainwashed citizens. Of course, Elphaba was never far behind; she was always lurking, listening, hungry for news and information; and thus, she’d had lots of time to observe, to absorb; to grow sorrowful and disgusted with the longing that still seized her after all these years.

She wanted to rip the bubble down so badly; she wanted to stomp it into the dirt and watch the tattered scraps of magic fade into the chilly air. Then, maybe, she could finally move on. But lives were on the line — lives other than her own, of course. _She_ wasn’t selfish.

“What… what are we going to do?” the Bobcat pleaded, ears plastered back to his skull and hackles raised to the point of genuine pain. “Elphaba, please; what are we going to do?” He was as out of it as she was, absolutely terrified, dropping any pretense of subordination or respect and instead addressing her as a peer; a fellow victim. She gritted her teeth and turned away.

Ignited by disgust, she returned the soldiers’ ring of fire with one of her own, an undulating whorl of dragon’s breath that erupted from the bubble’s edge and galloped outward as rapidly as her mind could allow. The men, consumed in battle-lust, had yet to realize their attack had been ineffectual, so they did nothing to avoid the flames leaping hungrily toward their borrowed false-pride vestments. The blaze feasted on yards of cheap emerald fabric and tchotchke fool’s-gold adornments, razing three entire rings of men.

The slanted, acrid smell of burning flesh leaked through even the bubble’s protective membrane, roiling Elphaba’s stomach. She gagged on air and was, inexplicably, actually grateful for having foregone meals for the past few days. The Bobcat was salivating despite himself, looking crestfallen and ashamed, but the poor Caiman had begun to retch as well. Elphaba noticed, with a considerable degree of nausea, that their wound was seeping blood again, fresh waves spilling out from between their belly scales and the slightest hint of a staggering diaphragm visible under the gore. She blamed herself for that, wholeheartedly: the hellfire had heated the bubble to an uncomfortable degree, essentially reactivating their whole system. In a meager attempt at penance, she rent a strip of fabric from her shirt and tossed it to the Bobcat, gesturing for him to tie it round the Caiman for an iota of temporary care.

Beholding the true extent of her actions at last, she kneeled mutely as she sustained her defenses, feeling blood seeping into her pants from the ground. A grotesque radius of scorched grass and half-charred man extended out for nearly twelve feet in every direction. The remaining soldiers were tripping over themselves to clear the area, rushing back to their posts as quickly as they had advanced. Elphaba’s vengeful streak reared its head: pouring a smouldering dose of rage into her magic, she chased them with that same fire, fast-expanding the ring and sending it flying across the battlefield. And she found that it was incredibly difficult to rein back in.

Quelling the flames came at the cost of dropping the bubble as well, exposing the three young adults to more harsh cold. Elphaba could vaguely hear the clamoring of retreat, but a vast silence stretched across the field. Errant Animal eyes peeked out from all sorts of notches and corners, making nary a sound, just as they had been trained to behave in the face of such danger. They waited in agonizing quiet for minutes upon minutes upon minutes, until a Crow careened through the sky and squalled a report of safety.

Rustles of activity immediately arose, wings and fur and scales and clothing swishing through the grass toward their commander and compatriots. They looked upon the trio in reverence, hesitant to approach too close. Elphaba thrust the Caiman into a stunned medic’s arms and stumbled through the crowd, dodging awestruck touches and cheers of affirmation. _That was amazing!_ someone rejoiced, causing her to flinch so hard she nearly fell over. She headed straight for the trees, searching for the path that her allies had hacked and slashed to get back to camp. Her glasses were so smeared with detritus that she might as well have been not wearing them at all; not to mention that her vision was beginning to go spotty, so she was under a bit of a time constraint.

The path failed to appear again and again, and a kindly Dog finally had the sense to ask her what she was searching for. She turned to him, arms hanging limp and confusion written across her features. Her cape, which usually commanded attention, only now served to make her appear very small. She was trembling.

“I’m looking _ffff_ -for…” she slurred, eyes glazing over, “l-looking for a way out.”

**Author's Note:**

> Just a little something I wanted to write about. Let me know if you'd be interested in me potentially expanding this into a series or something? I'd be down for that.
> 
> (Title from "The Show Must Go On," by Queen. Listen to it. It's good.)


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